One of the more charming things about the Monster Hunter fanbase is its generally-held belief that the best way for a monster to make a first impression is by kicking your head in. And after the latest Wilds update, hunters have been reporting with glee that its pair of returning monsters are doling out plenty of punishment.

Title Update 2 brought the long-awaited reappearance of Monster Hunter 3 flagship leviathan Lagiacrus after eight years of absence. It's joined by Seregios, a flying wyvern that first appeared in Monster Hunter 4U. Introduced in Title Update 2 as new midgame sidequests, their tempered variants are the latest additions to Wilds' endgame 8-star difficulty tier.

And I'll tell you from personal experience: They're not messing around.

It seems like Capcom's taken the repeated cries for higher difficulty Wilds content—one of the common refrains in the recent surge of negative Steam reviews—to heart. Four months after launch, tempered Lagiacrus has handed me my first failed solo hunts thanks to its habit of punishing poorly timed attacks with a death sentence of back-to-back lightning-charged body slams. I mean, look at this beautiful nightmare:

(If you're struggling with those same hip checks, I've learned the trick is to dodge towards its head. Hope that helps.)

Tempered Seregios, meanwhile, is a frantic reaction test, forcing hunters to navigate a hailstorm of aerial divekicks that'll open bleeding wounds. The new fights are harrowing, and on Reddit, hunters seem glad that they're being harrowed.

"Yes please, Capcom. You are on the right track," said redditor PeppermintButler17, calling the tempered Seregios and Lagiacrus fights "pretty much perfect." Elsewhere, user LashOut2016 said tempered Seregios "feels like a proper MH fight" thanks to "the chaos, the excitement, all of it," urging Capcom to "give me more of that." And on the MHWilds subreddit, a user-run poll shows most responding players in favor of the more intense hunt difficulty.

That enthusiasm has carried over to Bluesky, where Restart associate editor Jesse Vitelli has declared "Lagiacrus is back. We are back. This shit rules." User @derekvandyke said "there are plenty of things I would change about Monster Hunter Wilds, but then the Lagiacrus and Seregios fights drop and I'm just awestruck again."

Unsurprisingly, the response to the patch hasn't been universally positive. One redditor notes that, while the new tempered fights bring a welcome challenge, they've made a mess of how the game messages difficulty. "It all feels like putting band-aids on everything instead of making major adjustments to the overall game," Fresh-Association-21 said. "No rules, no planning, no direction. The progression and difficulty are all over the place."

Despite TU2's updates to texture streaming, performance and stability issues remain a point of contention. In a thread discussing post-patch performance, some players said Wilds is running smoother than ever, while others report that they're now crashing more than they have since launch.

Capcom deployed a hotfix to address those new crashes earlier this morning, but it sounds like Wilds' performance woes are still a ways from being solved—if they ever will be.